MPH Technology Department Celebrates National Computer Science Education Week

Technology Department chair Ryan Zlomek is offering a wide variety of activities to students in celebration of National Computer Science Education Week, December 5-9.  There will be three main activities happening on campus and online during the week promoting MPH’s technology offerings, including an online film festival, school-wide video game challenge, and an hour-of-code seminar for Middle School and Upper School students.

Film Festival:
Students in the Cinematic Storytelling class have just finished creating documentaries about different teachers at MPH. They are beautiful portraits of our educators and convey the multi-layered nature of the role models we have on campus. Every day through Facebook, Twitter, and the school website we will spotlight a different film as it is “released” to the public via Vimeo or Youtube.

Video Game Challenge:
With students across all three divisions using the Scratch programming language in a variety of different ways, there will be a challenge for all students to create a video game over the course of the week that will be showcased during tutorial (11:05 to 11:45) on December 12 in the computer lab and library.

Similar to a 24-hour film festival, this game challenge will give students some restrictions to work within in order to spawn media development in a concentrated period of time. Requirements for the games will be posted on Monday so that students can let intuition lead them to create something great. These types of requirements will be visual and related to MPH (ex: every game has to include the Farmhouse or make a game about your favorite MPH tradition).

Hour Of Code:
Many of our students have come forward to volunteer their programming services by leading a tutorial group in a Scratch or OpenSCAD activity. These students will become teachers and will work with their classes  on ways to approach Computer Science. The Scratch groups will be creating simple sprites, learning how to program them  and have them interact. The OpenSCAD students are going to have the goal of creating a 3D model of a character using the syntax for shapes, translation, and rotation.

Follow MPH’s social media to learn more about National Computer Science Education Week next week!